PROGRAM OVERVIEW

You will be spending a significant amount of time in between each of the lectures talking to customers. Each week your team will conduct customer interviews focused on a specific part of the business model canvas. This program is a simulation of what startups and entrepreneurship is like in the real world: chaos, uncertainty, impossible deadlines in insufficient time, conflicting input, etc.

Sitting in the back of the room are experienced instructors and professionals who have worked with hundreds of entrepreneurial teams. We won’t be lecturing in the traditional sense, but commenting and critiquing on each team’s progress. While the comments may be specific for each team, the insights are almost always applicable to all teams. 

While other teams are presenting the results of their weekly experiments, the rest of the participants are expected to attentively listen, engage, and react to what they see and hear. Sharing insights, experience, and contacts with each other is a key way that this unique laboratory achieves results

Startups communicate in a dramatically different style from the university or large company culture you may be familiar with. At times it can feel brusque and impersonal, but in reality is focused and oriented to create immediate action in time, and cash-constrained environments. We have limited time and we push, challenge, and question you in the hope you will quickly learn. We will be direct, open, and tough just like the real world. This approach may seem harsh or abrupt, but it is all part of our wanting you to learn to challenge yourselves quickly and objectively, and to appreciate that as entrepreneurs you need to learn and evolve faster than you ever imagined possible.

This program pushes many people past their comfort zone. You will be receiving critiques in front of your peers weekly, and the pace and the uncertainty pick up as the class proceeds. As part of the process, we also expect you to question us, challenge our point of view if you disagree, and engage in a real dialog with the teaching team.

This class is team-based, and you will be admitted as a team. Teams must submit a proposal for entry before the class begins. Projects must be approved before the class.

The teams will self-organize and establish individual roles on their own. There are no formal CEO/VPs, just the constant parsing and allocating of the tasks that need to be done.

This class hits the ground running. It assumes you and your team have read the assigned reading, viewed the online lectures, and prepared a set of customers to call on. A syllabus will be provided to accepted teams.